Speaking Truth to Power
For this week, I decided to watch a video of a conversation with Rita de Grandis, a UBC professor from Hispanic Studies, focusing on the Argentine military regime and the protest known as ‘Mothers of the Disappeared’ until the end of the dictatorship.
Military dictatorship began from 1976 to 1983, and it was done far too brutally, that Argentines began to use the expression ‘disappear’, for the suspects who left no trace behind. Victims were often young because the military government’s target was to anybody with beard or jeans.
First organisation to resist against this military regime was ‘Madres de Plaza de Mayo’, where mothers and grandmothers of their missing child accused the corruption. Without denying their gender roles, these women infused them with political value. It was also interesting because of these middle-class mothers and women associated with a political agency. Argentina was facing a rare situation, where usually political issues take precedence.
Raúl Alfonsín declared that military officials had merely been acting out of duty. Followed by the declaration, Carlos Menem, who took his role as a president, issued pardons to military figures. Finally, Néstor Kirchner rises up in power, where pardons were quashed, allowing old cases to be re-opened. Detention centre where educated military officers were forced to be kept has turned into museums and was revealed to the public.
The first Argentine democratic government began under Alfonsín’s regime. However, he resigned in 1989 due hyperinflation that led to the severe economic crisis. With a short-lived democratic government, neo-liberalism and inequality took over during the Menem regime, fueling new populist ways to emerge.
Resistance nowadays has been transformed into negotiation and reformism, where it was inspired from utopianism or some kind of a radical power, which has given way to a more pragmatic attempt to seek small reforms in civil society. With the utopianism of the 60s and 70s in Nicaragua, it has ceded to a more pragmatic vision of what it means to run a country.
Latin Americans find it difficult to emulate the republican tradition of democracy because of a long-standing tendency to Caudillismo and charismatic leadership. Also, at the same time, the middle class still thinks in terms of civilization and barbarism. Towards the end of the video, she told her audience that Canadian citizens should be more aware of the power in the democratic voting system. My question for this week is: If Alfonsín was able to continue to take power (putting aside the economic crisis that led to his resignation), until the present day, how different would Argentina be?